"Sandra Day O’Connor, First Woman on the Supreme Court, Is Dead at 93/During a crucial period in American law — when abortion, affirmative action, sex discrimination and voting rights were on the docket — she was the most powerful woman in the country" (NYT).
The NYT obituary is by Linda Greenhouse. Excerpt:
Fifty-one years old at the time of her nomination, she served for 24 years, retiring in January 2006 to care for her ailing husband. As the court moved to the right during that period, her moderate conservatism made her look in the end like a relative liberal.From the WaPo obituary, by Fred Barbash:
She never went far enough in any area of the law to fully satisfy either conservatives or liberals of the day, Republicans or Democrats....
If there were only one person who made all the decisions on the most important issues at the Supreme Court, Justice Elena Kagan said of her in a 2017 tribute, you would want it to be Justice O’Connor. “If it were Justice O’Connor, it would all turn out all right.”
She cast her often-decisive vote “in a way that demonstrated extraordinary wisdom,” Kagan said, “that understood something about this nation, about the people who inhabit it, what they would and would not stand for, about what their best values were, and she did this over and over again. And really we are such a better nation because of that.”
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46 comments:
Wow, only 93, that's young for SCOTUS judge, I think Stevens made it to 100. I can't say much good about her. I blame Reagan for putting her on the bench. He campaigned as someone who wanted more Renquists, and his first pick was an underqualified nobody from Arizona. Nobody in Reagan's base asked for that. Unlike Bush with Souter, he didn't have the excuse of having to get a pick past a Democrat controlled Senate.
I might have had more respect for Grandma O'connor is she'd had an understandable and clear judicial philosophy. Instead, she saw her job as perserving the status quo, preventing any real conservative change and crafting a compromise. She loved judicial power. Remeber that KC school district case? And the door always had to be left open. Never say never.
Her votes to keep miranda, affirmative action and abortion are classic examples.
I will give her one thing, unlike Ginsberg she didn't hang around and die in office. She left, IRC, to take care of her husband. And spent almost 20 years off the bench. Later, she said she regretted leaving so early. But the decision couldn't be undone. Thank God.
Another first for the Biden White Home.
The first retired Woman Justice to die.
Example of her wisdom:
25 years.
A justice's job is not to take the temperature of the nation and make sure court decisions reflect today's prevailing values. It's to decide cases based on the law, and the law (statutory or constitutional) is what a reasonable person at the time of its passage would have understood it to mean based on the text. If the people's values change, they can change the law. That's why we elect congresscritters. Yes, it is extremely hard to change the constitution, but that's a good thing.
Need an example of extraordinary wisdom.
Democrat Party members and feminazis never gave O'Connor credit for "breaking the glass ceiling". Those hyper-politicized frauds lavished that praise on libtard Ginsburg, as if O'Connor never existed.
She cast her often-decisive vote Kagan said, “that understood something about this nation, about the people who inhabit it, what they would and would not stand for, about what their best values were, and she did this over and over again.
Ain't that precious?
Nothing mentioned about the Constitution? Or the specific language of the law under review?
Kagan reflects how she rules at the very least.
Justice O'Connor was whip smart - graduated 3rd in class from Stanford law (William Hubbs Rehnquist was number 1). She was always the Justice I most frequently agreed with. She was a terrific choice by President Reagan. May she rest in peace.
I'm sorry to hear about her passing. I looked it up and I think only Thomas and Roberts, who himself had just recently been appointed to the Court, were on the court when she retired in 2006. It feels like the composition of the court has changed a lot since then.
O'Connor was just another poor choice from R presidents, joining,
--- Blackmun
--- Stevens
--- Kennedy
--- Souter
Blogger rcocean said...
she saw her job as perserving the status quo
With the principle of Stare Decisis, isn't a big part of the job of the Court preserving the status quo? Not to say that there aren't things the Court has gotten wrong, and egregiously wrong enough that it warrants overturning precedent, but shouldn't that be the fringe of cases and a very small part of what a Justice sees as their role on the court?
That final paragraph quoted from the WaPo makes her sound like a fine legislator.
her moderate conservatism made her look in the end like a relative liberal.
I think the right wording would be the Progressive jerk towards Authoritarian Socialism made pretty much any moderate or conservative look liberal.
I wonder how many of those Progressives remember that Sandra Day O'Connor was the first woman on the bench rather than assuming it was RBG. Will SCOTUS even remember what a woman is overtime?
Kudos to her for reitring from SCOTUS at a reseanable age and not hanging on through dotage.
Also kudos for taking in stride, John Riggin's drunk comment; “come on, loosen up, Sandy baby, you’re too tight”.
"pathbreaking"? WaPo must be hiring them right out of third grade these days. And still can't afford to pay them what they're worth.
I was not a fan of Justice O'Connor's jurisprudence, but I met her once and found her a wonderful person. In 2002, I was spending a month in Ireland on a study abroad program in law school, the Dean knew her and knew she had a summer home near Dublin and arranged for her to spend some time with us. I assumed she'd stop by campus give a talk and maybe a group photo.
Then one Sunday morning, the school organized a tour to the countryside. A school bus came to the hotel where we were staying to pick us up at 8 AM. As we climbed on, we saw Justice O'Connor already on the bus, ready to join us. She did give that talk in the afternoon--but first she spent the whole day with us, an hour on the bus (each way), the tour, lunch, a half hour in a cold drizzle standing by a lake so that each of us could have a one-on-one picture taken with her.
She was amazingly generous with her time.
What, no quotes from the ever frumpy but dependably lefty Nina Totenberg?
Historic first. Rarely gets credit from progressive DNC Media hacks.
While Justice O'Connor may not have been in the end as conservative as some would have liked, she was considerably more conservative than her predecessor, Justice Potter Stewart. The fact is that every justice appointed from Nixon until Clinton was as or more conservative than his or her predecessor: Burger - Warren, Blackmun - Fortas, Powell - Black, Rehnquist - Harlan, Stevens - Douglas, O'Connor - Stewart, Rehnquist - Burger, Scalia - Rehnquist, Kennedy - Powell, Souter - Brennan, Thomas - Marshall. Her presence on the Court made it more difficult for Justices Brennan and Marshall to find a fifth vote if they could attract Justices Blackmun and Stevens to join them.
She was a class act. And truly a trailblazer, though she did not have the media cred that RBG had because she was not as into killing babies.
One other note that I find interesting, the left always has nice things to say about conservatives, after the conservative has passed away. They like us dead. Hate us when we're alive. The only variance from this that I can think of is Henry Kissinger, who is apparently hated even in death.
Reading the comments made me laugh. Yeah, she was "whip smart". So what? And she was a nice person. Okey-dokey.
And no the job of SCOTUS is not to "perserve the status quo". Do you think Brown v. Board did that? And was Dred Scott OK? That certainly perserved the status quo in the South.
O’Connor was just another poor choice from R presidents, joining,
— Blackmun
— Stevens
— Kennedy
— Souter
She seems to have been an accomplished and thoroughly decent human being. If she had been a Democrat, there would be a forty foot high statue of her in front of the Supreme Court. Gilded too....I didn't read the obits. I suppose she got a few kind words. That's about as much as she could ever hope for. They didn't take the trouble to research her high school classmates to discover if she had been in some kind of mean girl clique. I guess that's because she had been off the bench for a long time, and she wasn't in the news.
"...and by 'their best values', I mean the ones that are most like my own."
NYT publishes its hopes and dreams of human rites, diversity, and genderism in an OpEd masquerading as an obituary.
And yet, affirmative action didn't die with her...
Justice O'Connor was a remarkable person. I met then Senator O'Connor in her home over brunch to resolve partisan differences over a piece of criminal law legislation. She managed to steer the matter to a compromise, but painless, resolution.
Her time on the Supreme Court, in my opinion, reflected this proclivity, although the compromises were not always painless. So many claim to want moderates on the Court, but really don't. The criticism of her opinions often stemmed from her moderation. Not conservative enough. Not liberal enough. I fall into the former group, but having known her I never questioned her intelligence or her integrity.
I found her inspirational simply because she was a remarkable woman. She could have gotten rich from her position - both while on court and after - but did not. She left the court when it was the right time for her (although made sure there was a Republican president).
Compare and contrast to the egregious Ruthie who became quite wealthy - the enormous speaking fees for a 1 hour gig (not to mention first class airfare and 5 star hotels) and book deals. And she didn't leave the court when she should have. Her opinions aren't even held in high regard.
in my "extended" family book club, I almost cried when the young millennials said "Sandra Who?". They thought Ruth was the 1st woman appointed to the Supreme Court. The libs are VERY good at creating and marketing icons of worthless tools.
Rehnquist knew he was in poor health, but wanted to stay on a little longer. Told O'Connor, law school classmate and one time brief girlfriend, there should be a term space between departures so she should leave. She did, and he promptly died. She was pissed, and Roberts nomination to assiciate justice changed to chief justice.
Temujin said...
"One other note that I find interesting, the left always has nice things to say about conservatives, after the conservative has passed away. They like us dead. Hate us when we're alive."
So the only good conservative is a dead conservative.
It is fascinating to read numerous comments by NYT election deniers accusing Justice O'Connor of "appointing" George Bush to the Presidency.
Here is a headline from NYT at the time: “Study of Disputed Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote,” from The New York Times.
USA Today's waffling aside, the multi-million dollar study by news organs, including CNN, concluded that under the most reliable scenarios, Bush won the final count in Florida.
It shouldn’t be a judge’s job to “fully satisfy” anyone. The intrusion of politics into every phase of public and private life is corrosive.
This is me saying (almost) nothing about her as a Justice.
A convivial woman. I got to have dinner with her once. We talked about her horses and how incredible it was that Martha Stewart made her own little pom-poms from scratch and was teaching fellow inmates how to crochet in prison. Same dinner I was at with Rosalyn Carter.
I got to have dinner with lots of people because I was the only bloody student, then graduate student, who ever bothered to read a newspaper. I also got to eat with Al Haig a few times, plus one of the Hamilton Fishes. Same reason. The Seventies and Eighties were a deep nadir in political involvement by the young. So very deep that I was their best recourse.
Steve Bannon was an ass. Al Haig graciously educated me. Go figure.
O'Connor was someone I both agreed and disagreed with at different times. But she was a serious person and not an ideologue, unlike several of the males and females who followed her.
Souter quit because he was couldn't handle the pressure, which is shameful. O'Connor left because she wanted to give her husband some time together before he, affected by Alzheimers, forgot who she was. I didn't like the intellectually incoherent kicking the ball down the road Affirmative Action decision, obviously.
This is one appointment of Reagan, of a republican, on the Supreme Court that stood the test of time. (Anthony Kennedy as well) I have deep admiration for her performing justice as a justice. Heard her once at a university student justice dialog.
Can't say that for so many.
Some like Ginsburg, good people in their own way, but who wouldn't quit when it was time. O'Connor resigned because the husband had Alzheimer. That is a far more difficult task than any human should have to handle. But that is what makes us human. She stood tall — she was an example for how to conduct life par excellence.
She saw and heard the Trinity nuke test, but at a great distance from her family's ranch in AZ. Big surprise.
I always thought of her as more of a politician than a judge, looking for compromise and consensus-building rather than establishing sound judicial principles and sticking to them. I don’t how true it was, but I read that Sandra Day O’Conner’s position on Grutter was swayed by the service academies insisting that they could not meet their goals for recruiting black officers without affirmative action. By why should that matter? That’s their problem, not the law’s.
Blackmun - I have no idea why nixon chose him
STevens - this was not a "bad pick" in the sense that Ford wanted a liberal and got one.
Souter - Bush didn't want to a judicial fight, so he went with Souter. He didn't care. People forget that bush chose thomas because he was black, and because moderate Danforth could get him confirmed. The whole Hill thing and Thomas being conservative wasn't forseen by bush.
Kennedy - The best reagan could do after ginsberg/bork went down.
Roberts - A terrible pick and completely Bush's fault.
The Greenhouse obituary reads like one of the Lives of the Saints. Such a saintly glowing aura around O'Connor. Greenhouse regrets O'Connor's retirement, and resents that she had to, but if someone can't freely retire from public life at 75 or 76, then when could they retire? It's good she was able to enjoy a few years before her own Alzheimer's took over.
@ Dave B: Hard to imagine seeing her like again. Imagine growing up on her family’s property in SE Arizona, the 250 square mile Lazy B ranch, where round up involved large numbers of riders working for days on end. Number three in her class at Stanford. Down to earth and not an ideologue. Seems like a lost era....
I've wondered for the past few years if anybody was quoting O'Connor.
“The appearance of corruption can be as dangerous to democracy as corruption itself”
She didn't exactly retire. She contined to sit by designation on various circuit panels. I was in New Orleans in 2009 arguing when she came for a week of arguments. There was palpable excitement in the courthouse, with extra security and special receptions. Must have been nice to bathe in bipartisan adulation.
Epstein and Yoo comment in Law Talk this month
My extremely left leaning, woke, multinational corporation couldn’t seem to find her during our month long celebration of important women during “women’s” month.
Ginsburg however was front and center in the corporate celebration.
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